EEG-based Multimodal Representation Learning for Emotion Recognition

Multimodal learning has been a popular area of research, yet integrating electroencephalogram (EEG) data poses unique challenges due to its inherent variability and limited availability. In this paper, we introduce a novel multimodal framework that accommodates not only conventional modalities such as video, images, and audio, but also incorporates EEG data. Our framework is designed to flexibly handle varying input sizes, while dynamically adjusting attention to account for feature importance across modalities. We evaluate our approach on a recently introduced emotion recognition dataset that combines data from three modalities, making it an ideal testbed for multimodal learning. The experimental results provide a benchmark for the dataset and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. This work highlights the potential of integrating EEG into multimodal systems, paving the way for more robust and comprehensive applications in emotion recognition and beyond.

GLA-DA: Global-Local Alignment Domain Adaptation for Multivariate Time Series

Unlike images and natural language tokens, time series data is highly semantically sparse, resulting in labor-intensive label annotations. Unsupervised and Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation (UDA and SSDA) have demonstrated efficiency in addressing this issue by utilizing pre-labeled source data to train on unlabeled or partially labeled target data. However, in domain adaptation methods designed for downstream classification tasks, directly adapting labeled source samples with unlabelled target samples often results in similar distributions across various classes, thereby compromising the performance of the target classification task. To tackle this challenge, we proposed a Global-Local Alignment Domain Adaptation (GLA-DA) method for multivariate time series data. Data from two domains were initially encoded to align in an intermediate feature space adversarially, achieving Global Feature Alignment (GFA). Subsequently, GLA-DA leveraged the consistency between similarity-based and deep learning-based models to assign pseudo labels to unlabeled target data. This process aims to preserve differences among data with distinct labels by aligning the samples with the same class labels together, achieving Local Class Alignment (LCA). We implemented GLA-DA in both UDA and SSDA scenarios, showcasing its superiority over state-of-the-art methods through extensive experiments on various public datasets. Ablation experiments underscored the significance of key components within GLA-DA.

Pistis-RAG: A Scalable Cascading Framework Towards Trustworthy Retrieval-Augmented Generation

In Greek mythology, Pistis symbolized good faith, trust, and reliability, echoing the core principles of RAG in LLM systems. Pistis-RAG, a scalable multi-stage framework, effectively addresses the challenges of large-scale retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Each stage plays a distinct role: matching refines the search space, pre-ranking prioritizes semantically relevant documents, and ranking aligns with the large language model's (LLM) preferences. The reasoning and aggregating stage supports the implementation of complex chain-of-thought (CoT) methods within this cascading structure. We argue that the lack of strong alignment between LLMs and the external knowledge ranking methods used in RAG tasks is relevant to the reliance on the model-centric paradigm in RAG frameworks. A content-centric approach would prioritize seamless integration between the LLMs and external information sources, optimizing the content transformation process for each specific task. Critically, our ranking stage deviates from traditional RAG approaches by recognizing that semantic relevance alone may not directly translate to improved generation. This is due to the sensitivity of the few-shot prompt order, as highlighted in prior work \cite{lu2021fantastically}. Current RAG frameworks fail to account for this crucial factor. We introduce a novel ranking stage specifically designed for RAG systems. It adheres to information retrieval principles while considering the unique business scenario captured by LLM preferences and user feedback. Our approach integrates in-context learning (ICL) methods and reasoning steps to incorporate user feedback, ensuring efficient alignment. Experiments on the MMLU benchmark demonstrate a 9.3\% performance improvement. The model and code will be open-sourced on GitHub. Experiments on real-world, large-scale data validate our framework's scalability.

LLM-based Knowledge Pruning for Time Series Data Analytics on Edge-computing Devices

Limited by the scale and diversity of time series data, the neural networks trained on time series data often overfit and show unsatisfacotry performances. In comparison, large language models (LLMs) recently exhibit impressive generalization in diverse fields. Although massive LLM based approaches are proposed for time series tasks, these methods require to load the whole LLM in both training and reference. This high computational demands limit practical applications in resource-constrained settings, like edge-computing and IoT devices. To address this issue, we propose Knowledge Pruning (KP), a novel paradigm for time series learning in this paper. For a specific downstream task, we argue that the world knowledge learned by LLMs is much redundant and only the related knowledge termed as "pertinent knowledge" is useful. Unlike other methods, our KP targets to prune the redundant knowledge and only distill the pertinent knowledge into the target model. This reduces model size and computational costs significantly. Additionally, different from existing LLM based approaches, our KP does not require to load the LLM in the process of training and testing, further easing computational burdens. With our proposed KP, a lightweight network can effectively learn the pertinent knowledge, achieving satisfactory performances with a low computation cost. To verify the effectiveness of our KP, two fundamental tasks on edge-computing devices are investigated in our experiments, where eight diverse environments or benchmarks with different networks are used to verify the generalization of our KP. Through experiments, our KP demonstrates effective learning of pertinent knowledge, achieving notable performance improvements in regression (19.7% on average) and classification (up to 13.7%) tasks, showcasing state-of-the-art results.

Fighting Against the Repetitive Training and Sample Dependency Problem in Few-shot Named Entity Recognition

Few-shot named entity recognition (NER) systems recognize entities using a few labeled training examples. The general pipeline consists of a span detector to identify entity spans in text and an entity-type classifier to assign types to entities. Current span detectors rely on extensive manual labeling to guide training. Almost every span detector requires initial training on basic span features followed by adaptation to task-specific features. This process leads to repetitive training of the basic span features among span detectors. Additionally, metric-based entity-type classifiers, such as prototypical networks, typically employ a specific metric that gauges the distance between the query sample and entity-type referents, ultimately assigning the most probable entity type to the query sample. However, these classifiers encounter the sample dependency problem, primarily stemming from the limited samples available for each entity-type referent. To address these challenges, we proposed an improved few-shot NER pipeline. First, we introduce a steppingstone span detector that is pre-trained on open-domain Wikipedia data. It can be used to initialize the pipeline span detector to reduce the repetitive training of basic features. Second, we leverage a large language model (LLM) to set reliable entity-type referents, eliminating reliance on few-shot samples of each type. Our model exhibits superior performance with fewer training steps and human-labeled data compared with baselines, as demonstrated through extensive experiments on various datasets. Particularly in fine-grained few-shot NER settings, our model outperforms strong baselines, including ChatGPT. We will publicly release the code, datasets, LLM outputs, and model checkpoints.

EfficientGS: Streamlining Gaussian Splatting for Large-Scale High-Resolution Scene Representation

In the domain of 3D scene representation, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a pivotal technology. However, its application to large-scale, high-resolution scenes (exceeding 4k$\times$4k pixels) is hindered by the excessive computational requirements for managing a large number of Gaussians. Addressing this, we introduce 'EfficientGS', an advanced approach that optimizes 3DGS for high-resolution, large-scale scenes. We analyze the densification process in 3DGS and identify areas of Gaussian over-proliferation. We propose a selective strategy, limiting Gaussian increase to key primitives, thereby enhancing the representational efficiency. Additionally, we develop a pruning mechanism to remove redundant Gaussians, those that are merely auxiliary to adjacent ones. For further enhancement, we integrate a sparse order increment for Spherical Harmonics (SH), designed to alleviate storage constraints and reduce training overhead. Our empirical evaluations, conducted on a range of datasets including extensive 4K+ aerial images, demonstrate that 'EfficientGS' not only expedites training and rendering times but also achieves this with a model size approximately tenfold smaller than conventional 3DGS while maintaining high rendering fidelity.

Face It Yourselves: An LLM-Based Two-Stage Strategy to Localize Configuration Errors via Logs

Configurable software systems are prone to configuration errors, resulting in significant losses to companies. However, diagnosing these errors is challenging due to the vast and complex configuration space. These errors pose significant challenges for both experienced maintainers and new end-users, particularly those without access to the source code of the software systems. Given that logs are easily accessible to most end-users, we conduct a preliminary study to outline the challenges and opportunities of utilizing logs in localizing configuration errors. Based on the insights gained from the preliminary study, we propose an LLM-based two-stage strategy for end-users to localize the root-cause configuration properties based on logs. We further implement a tool, LogConfigLocalizer, aligned with the design of the aforementioned strategy, hoping to assist end-users in coping with configuration errors through log analysis. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to localize the root-cause configuration properties for end-users based on Large Language Models~(LLMs) and logs. We evaluate the proposed strategy on Hadoop by LogConfigLocalizer and prove its efficiency with an average accuracy as high as 99.91%. Additionally, we also demonstrate the effectiveness and necessity of different phases of the methodology by comparing it with two other variants and a baseline tool. Moreover, we validate the proposed methodology through a practical case study to demonstrate its effectiveness and feasibility.

A Variational Autoencoder Framework for Robust, Physics-Informed Cyberattack Recognition in Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems

Cybersecurity of Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems is drawing significant concerns as data communication increasingly leverages wireless networks. A lot of data-driven methods were develope for detecting cyberattacks, but few are focused on distinguishing them from equipment faults. In this paper, we develop a data-driven framework that can be used to detect, diagnose, and localize a type of cyberattack called covert attacks on networked industrial control systems. The framework has a hybrid design that combines a variational autoencoder (VAE), a recurrent neural network (RNN), and a Deep Neural Network (DNN). This data-driven framework considers the temporal behavior of a generic physical system that extracts features from the time series of the sensor measurements that can be used for detecting covert attacks, distinguishing them from equipment faults, as well as localize the attack/fault. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method through a realistic simulation study on a networked power transmission system as a typical example of ICS. We compare the performance of the proposed method with the traditional model-based method to show its applicability and efficacy.

Adversarial Client Detection via Non-parametric Subspace Monitoring in the Internet of Federated Things

The Internet of Federated Things (IoFT) represents a network of interconnected systems with federated learning as the backbone, facilitating collaborative knowledge acquisition while ensuring data privacy for individual systems. The wide adoption of IoFT, however, is hindered by security concerns, particularly the susceptibility of federated learning networks to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we propose an effective non-parametric approach FedRR, which leverages the low-rank features of the transmitted parameter updates generated by federated learning to address the adversarial attack problem. Besides, our proposed method is capable of accurately detecting adversarial clients and controlling the false alarm rate under the scenario with no attack occurring. Experiments based on digit recognition using the MNIST datasets validated the advantages of our approach.

An Empirical Study of NetOps Capability of Pre-Trained Large Language Models

Nowadays, the versatile capabilities of Pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) have attracted much attention from the industry. However, some vertical domains are more interested in the in-domain capabilities of LLMs. For the Networks domain, we present NetEval, an evaluation set for measuring the comprehensive capabilities of LLMs in Network Operations (NetOps). NetEval is designed for evaluating the commonsense knowledge and inference ability in NetOps in a multi-lingual context. NetEval consists of 5,732 questions about NetOps, covering five different sub-domains of NetOps. With NetEval, we systematically evaluate the NetOps capability of 26 publicly available LLMs. The results show that only GPT-4 can achieve a performance competitive to humans. However, some open models like LLaMA 2 demonstrate significant potential.